The Democratic Party’s Undemocratic Opposition to No Labels

By opposing No Labels’ effort to secure nationwide ballot access for the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party is failing to live up to the central premise of the word “democratic” in its name. It is suppressing democracy.

The Democratic Party is doing this in two ways. The first is by attempting to literally keep No Labels off the ballot. We saw this when the Arizona Democratic Party took No Labels to court to try to invalidate the ballot access that had been granted by Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state. Fortunately, a judge rejected its claim on Aug. 9 and No Labels will be on the ballot in Arizona in 2024. 

The party's second method is more insidious. It has created a political culture in which anyone who refuses to back President Joe Biden is automatically accused of supporting the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump — and, by extension, the rise of a “dictator.”

No Labels agrees our democracy is broken, but we don’t accept the premise that the only way to fix it is to pledge blind fealty to one party.

One can reasonably disagree with this strategy. One cannot, without engaging in the most profoundly dishonest intellectual contortions, characterize a movement based on such a strategy as “radical,” “insincere” or “undemocratic.” Doing so is disrespectful to America’s vast commonsense majority, which craves problem-solving and is profoundly dissatisfied with both Biden and Trump.

It is also flat-out undemocratic. There is no way of spinning this that doesn't make it undemocratic, by the literal definition of the word. If denying a political movement access to the ballot after it has met the legal requirements for appearing there is not undemocratic, then the word has no practical meaning.  

Yet we are told that we must ignore this hypocrisy at the core of the anti-No Labels campaign because the threat to democracy Trump poses is too great to be ignored. This reminds me of a famous dialogue scene from the play “A Man for All Seasons.” In it, in a fictional conversation between British leader Sir Thomas More and a young lawyer, one character defends allowing the devil to benefit from protection under the law.

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” 

By trying to silence all critics of Biden, Democrats are flouting the very spirit of the democracy that they wish to save from their devil, Trump. 

If Democrats want to stop Trump from being reelected because they believe his victory would imperil democracy, they should focus on picking a stronger candidate than Biden or developing ideas that are more persuasive to voters. After all, if they are correct that only a candidate in the two-party system realistically can win an election, then they should be replacing the incumbent president — who is currently losing head-to-head to Trump nationally and in almost every swing state. In fact, Biden has the lowest approval rating of any incumbent president in the history of modern polling, and there is no historical precedent for a president digging out of this big of a hole by Election Day.  

Instead, Democratic establishment leaders — within and outside of the Democratic Party — hope that voters will have no choice but to back their candidate over Trump.

If they think this method will work on a disenchanted electorate, one that has grown wise to self-interested politicians, the polls showing Biden trailing Trump strongly suggest otherwise. 

Margaret White is co-executive director of No Labels.